Hi there,
The main reason is that customers and users are not the same things. Users are customers that have elected to open/register an account on your site. Customers, however, can elect to purchase something from your site (depending on your store settings) without opening a user account –> So they’re a customer without an account 🙂
In short:
- Customer: Someone that purchased goods on your store
- User: A customer that purchased goods on your store AND elected to open a user account.
Thread Starter
lsingh
(@lsingh)
Ok, but how is this distinguished at the log-in stage? You either register or don’t register.
Or, is this because all previous customers who bought from the site were users and everyone who is new is added as a customer since we added the registration?
Hi @lsingh,
All this depends mostly on how you’ve set up WooCommerce → Settings → Accounts & Privacy
If you’d like to require buyers to become users, you could have WooCommerce to require an account before checkout. You can allow users to open accounts during checkout as well. Here’s an illustration of the settings that would easily serve this purpose: https://snipboard.io/D30m9U.jpg
For reference on accounts and privacy, kindly check this documentation: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/configuring-woocommerce-settings/#accounts-and-privacy-settings
Regarding your customers, I checked your site and it seems that the **Free Download** items require one to create a user account before downloading. On the other hand, it seems that the other products allow guest checkouts, that is, buyers can complete checkout without opening an account.
I hope this clarifies.
Hi,
We’ve not heard back from you in a while, so I’m marking this thread as resolved. Hopefully, the above info was useful!
If you have further questions, please feel free to open a new topic.
Thanks.
